We’ve all been there. You buy something in-store and request an emailed copy of the receipt. Later that day, you sign up for online bill pay, book a weekend outing, and finally sign up for that social network you’ve been holding out on. You browse the network, find a lot of great content, and opt into a handful of e-newsletters. You receive confirmation emails from each of the day’s activities, and you’re happy to have them for reference.

A few days pass and you receive a barrage of emails that you didn’t have just a week ago. Then it hits you—you opted into nearly a dozen mailing lists in a single day. Some you signed up for intentionally; not others. You didn’t know the emailed receipt would add you to Macy’s promotional emails, that applying to a job through CyberCoders translated into daily job alert emails, or that switching to online bill pay would land you the “latest and greatest offers” from Comcast.

Then it sinks in—subscriber’s remorse. You do not want to receive these emails now or in the future.

At SaneBox, we believe email should work for you, not against you. That isn’t happening in this scenario, and that’s exactly why we built SaneBlackHole, a safe, easy, effective way of ditching unwanted mailing lists forever. Being the engineering and business types, we’re also numbers people. And that’s exactly why we ran queries to see which common domains are most often banished to the BlackHole.

Here, a look at 2015’s worst offenders, based on the percentage of total unsubscribes.

Feel free to use this infographic on your own site, just give attribution to http://www.SaneBox.com. Thanks for sharing, and happy emailing.

Inboxes are like hearts. Everyone has one, and we each have our own way of dealing with its contents.

In fact, how we handle one might provide some clues as to how we handle the other. Relationships are about communication, after all, and what says more about how we communicate than our email habits?

Even psychologists have weighed in on what your email use can reveal about your personality. Keeping a clean inbox can give anxiety sufferers a sense of control, for example, while saving emails can provide a sense of security for the insecure.

Curious to find out what your email habits say about you? Read on to see which email personality fits you best, then let us know what type you are in the comments.

The Archivist

In email: You file every email into a folder and rarely throw anything away. Your archives contain everything from records of eBay purchases to forwards from friends. Your personal motto is, “I might need that someday.”

In love: You cherish each and every person who has passed through your life, and you’ve got the mementos to prove it. You’re the one with shoeboxes of love letters from past flames in your closet, and you’re probably still Facebook friends with some of your exes.

The Inbox Sweeper

In email: Inbox Zero is your norm; you can’t stand a cluttered inbox. You ruthlessly zap spam and don’t hesitate to unsubscribe when your email volume becomes too cumbersome. Ending the day with an empty inbox helps you sleep at night.

In love: You don’t shy away from confrontation—you deal with issues as they arise. You’re not one to hold a grudge or let things fester. In relationships you play the role of Felix, keeping things tidy and in order. You might even enjoy long stretches of glorious singlehood. You prefer your life… uncomplicated.

The Tagger

In email: You’ve developed a robust tagging system and religiously tag all of your emails for easy reference.

In love: You thrive on having a certain level of compartmentalization in your life. You keep your relationships neatly categorized, your priorities straight, and your boundaries strong. Your little black book is meticulously organized, with helpful notes in the margins.

The Notification Addict

In email: When you hear that ding of a new email, you immediately drop whatever you’re doing and rush to check your inbox. Doesn’t matter if you’re working on a big project or eating breakfast—you can’t resist finding out what the next email will bring.

In love: You crave connection. New love interests can expect to hear from you often, whether it’s an invitation to have tea or a text to see how their day went. Your ideal partner will reciprocate with text-versations throughout the day, and these conversations might trickle into other platforms like Snapchat or Words With Friends.

The CCer

In email: Emails from you rarely go to just one recipient. You’re the person at the office who routinely copies the whole team. The more people you invite to the conversation, the better—at least that’s how you see it.

In love: A date with you often consists of going out with a group of friends. Wherever you go, you tend to gather people around you. Pinning you down for one-on-one time might be a challenge, but your perfect mate will have a good time trying.

So there you have it—four of the most common types of emailers out there, plus what their tendencies say about their approach to love. Which category do you most identify with? If none of the above, then fifth category are we missing?

SaneBox is an easy-to-use inbox tool that will help you make your email manageable again. How? It prioritizes important emails and summarizes the rest. Start today for free »

Some professors thrive on using email to engage students. Take John Whittier-Ferguson, a University of Michigan English professor, whose students email him for help mastering the finer points of essay writing. In any given class, about a third of his students take advantage of his offer to provide e-feedback, each exchanging around 40 meaty emails with him over the course of a term.

Many professors, however, see having email as a go-to communication as a huge headache.

Consider these examples of real emails professors have received:

“Can you send me your lecture notes from the class I skipped yesterday?”

“I was late to class on Monday because I drank too much at a party.”

“Should I buy a binder or a subject notebook?”

Whether intellectual or imbecilic, all those emails add up to a lot of extra work for already overstretched college faculty. In fact, a recent study at the University of South Australia suggests university employees perceive higher levels of email overload than their peers in other industries.

In a comparison between the university’s academic and professional staff, the academics were hit the hardest—they received, sent and read more emails than their professional counterparts.

No time for teaching?

Many universities expect professors to spend at least 60 percent of their work time teaching and the rest on research and service. But an ongoing study by Boise State University on how professors manage their time has found that university faculty spend 13 percent of their workday on email alone.

Add to that the time they spend in meetings, and a full 30 percent of faculty time is “spent on activities that are not traditionally thought of as part of the life of an academic,” said John Ziker, chair of Boise State University’s anthropology department.

Traditional part of academic life or not, many professors feel pressured to stay on top of their email. In the academic world, where it’s publish or die, they can’t afford to miss an important email related to their research. And with tenure prospects often resting heavily on student evaluations, they can’t afford to alienate students by not responding.

So to achieve the required teaching ratio—or the appearance of it, at least—many professors end up clocking 60-hour work weeks.

Who’s teaching the teachers?

Despite their heavier email load, academics are less likely than professionals to manage their inboxes effectively, the Australian study found. Yet they also place higher value on email.

“We would suggest that email overload typifies the working environment … in modern universities, pointing to the importance of training staff in email management strategies for improving productivity and well-being,” said research author Dr. Silvia Pignata.

Given email’s importance in research and teaching, what professors need most is help managing the email flood. Although academics are more likely than professionals to restrict when they check their email, they drop the ball when it comes to filing messages.

Training on effective email use, combined with robust inbox management tools, can help university faculty streamline their inboxes and spend less time sifting out the dross.

SaneBox saves email users an average of 3+ hours per week by prioritizing important emails and summarizing the rest. Learn more about its suite of email productivity tools, and start today for free »

The world is abuzz with discussions about how email overload curbs work productivity. But let’s get personal for a minute.

Do you realize all that time you spend answering and organizing email is taking a toll on your health and happiness? ( « Click to Tweet )

It’s true. Employing an email organizer to help tame your inbox not only improves your work performance, but it makes your life better in other areas, too. When you minimize the tedious and generally unimpactful practice of living in email, you’ll notice striking improvements in your life. Here are four powerful upsides to saying no to email overload:

1. You’ll Like Your Job More

Being able to count on predictable time away from work improves job satisfaction. When email blurs the line between home and work, our happiness at both suffers.

When one group of consultants committed to reducing their after-hours workload, abstaining from email and working 11 percent less overall, their job satisfaction rate jumped from 49 percent to 72 percent. Incidentally, their productivity didn’t suffer.

2. You’ll Be Better Rested

Employees who feel pressured to respond to emails after hours get less sleep than those who don’t. In one study, they were more likely to agree with statements such as, “I have no energy for going to work in the morning.” They also reported more health-related absences than their counterparts.

“When people don’t have this recovery time, it switches them into an exhaustion state, so they go to work the next day not being engaged,” researcher Larissa Barber told TIME magazine. If the problem persists over time, of course, then the fatigue and work absences will only compound and become more severe.

3. You’ll Be Sharper

For over a decade studies have shown that the distractions caused by continuously receiving emails can dock your IQ by as much as 10 points. The Institute of Psychiatry points out that this drop is equivalent to losing a night’s sleep—on top of the actual sleep you’ve already lost due to email—and is more than double the effects of smoking marijuana.

4. You’ll Improve Your Memory

Email interruptions throughout the day can disrupt your ability to remember tasks you need to perform in the future. Known as prospective memory failure, this condition plagues employees who switch tasks frequently. Simply enlisting the help of an automated email organizer frees up your brain power for remembering the important things, both in your personal and your professional life.

SaneBox is an easy-to-use inbox tool that will help you make your email manageable again by prioritizing important emails and summarizing the rest. Start today for free »

]]>http://blog.sanebox.com/2015/06/10/reduce-email-improve-life/feed/0sanebox2015imageimageimageimageimageimageHow a Leading Social Media Ad Company Took on Email Overload—And Wonhttp://blog.sanebox.com/2015/06/02/sanebox-testimonial-ampush-email-management/
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“SaneBox is a really nifty tool. I think it’s one of the best things that happened to email in the last decade,” Vaibhav Mathur, Product Manager, Ampush

As a leading and rapidly growing in-feed social media advertising company, Ampush sprouted from 20 employees to over 100 in just two short years. This was a great accomplishment, to be sure, but with rapid success came new challenges, one of which was communication.

Recognizing email as the biggest communication tool at Ampush, CEO Jesse Pujji knew it was crucial to empower his team to use it as efficiently and effectively as possible.

“I never will go a day without responding to all my email to make sure people have what they need in terms of information,” he explained. “I was on a quest to find all the tools that would help me do that better, and I came across SaneBox.”

At the most basic level, SaneBox saves users hours each week by learning which emails deserve to be front and center in your inbox and which emails should be placed in a save-for-later (or “SaneLater”) folder. This method not only keeps interruptions to a minimum, but it also ensures that no important message is overlooked.

“[Email] took a lot of time out of my day because everything was in my inbox,” recalls senior media analyst Andrew Grillo. “I had to make a bunch of filters manually per what was important and what was not and with different clients as well. I’ve been using SaneBox for around ten months now. It’s been really great. It’s really easy just to see the important ones and just look at the filtered ones later.”

Product manager Vaibhav Mathur agrees. “It helps me distinguish between what is important and what’s not. I can effectively process all of my urgent and important email and communicate effectively with my peers.”

Beyond automatic, intuitive filtering, SaneBox’s suite of productivity features includes the ability to set highly customizable reminders, to snooze emails for a later time, to unsubscribe from email lists with one click, and much more. SaneBox for Business goes even further, providing Salesforce integration and in-depth insights on individual and team email usage and effectiveness.

Co-Founder and COO Nick Shah points to the resulting gamification that stems from the analytics:

“We use it as kind of a gamification tool. We take those insights and share on our internal collaboration tool. It demonstrates to the rest of the company that this particular productivity tool is an important part of working at the company.”

Watch the video in its entirety to see how “SaneBox just makes email better,” then schedule a demo with an experienced SaneBox Client Success Representative to see what SaneBox can do for your organization.

Unfortunately, inefficient habits can become ingrained within a company, frustrating employees and erecting barriers to productivity. Do any of these common efficiency killers sound familiar to you?

Communication Breakdowns

Yes, we mean email. On average, employees spend 37 percent of their work week answering and organizing email. That’s a big chunk of time devoted to impersonal, inefficient communication—surely we can do better.

For starters, email doesn’t work well as a collaborative platform. Send an email loaded with CCs, and a few “reply alls” later you’ll find the original purpose has been completely obfuscated as the conversation veers off track.

Add the likelihood of information getting lost and people misreading an email’s intent—causing misunderstandings that demand more time to iron out—and it’s easy to see why managing email dependency has become a top priority for many innovative companies.

Situationally, email is an incredible tool. But when it becomes the main form of communication in your workplace, you have a problem.

Meeting Madness

If your answer to the email problem is to encourage face-to-face interaction by scheduling more meetings, you’re on the wrong track.

Employees spend an average of 5.6 hours each week in meetings, and most spend up to four additional hours a week preparing for them. In fact, a Microsoft study found that the average worker spends only 1.5 hours a day actually working. The rest of the time is wasted—and guess which unproductive activity tops the list?

That’s right: Nearly half of employees say meetings are their biggest waste of time at the office. According to former Ernst & Young executive Al Pittampalli, author of Read This Before Our Next Meeting, most meetings are not about collaboration but rather “bureaucratic excuse-making and the kabuki dance of company politics.”

Or, as economist John Kenneth Galbraith put it, “Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.” ( « Tweet This )

Process Paralysis

Ah, the P-word. Process is another prime example of an efficiency tool gone wrong.

At their best, processes provide a way to measure progress and keep business running smoothly. But as companies grow in size and complexity, their processes can become mountain-size burdens that stand squarely in the way of work getting done.

In the past 15 years, the number of “procedures, vertical layers, interface structures, coordination bodies and decision approvals” required within U.S. and European companies has increased by between 50 and 350 percent, according to a study by the Boston Consulting Group. As a result, managers spend at least 40 percent of their time just jumping through procedural hoops.

Every company needs standards for best practices against which employees can measure themselves. But effective standards reduce the need for hoop-jumping and approvals—not increase it.

Blurry Leadership

Great companies have a clear vision and focused goals. Great leaders communicate that vision and look to their employees for solutions that meet those goals.

When a company’s vision is unclear, or unclearly communicated, employees have no greater purpose to rally around. They may become fuzzy on what their role is, both individually and as a team, and waste time shooting arrows in the dark instead of moving toward a common goal. Job satisfaction sags, and morale drops—and with it, productivity.

In fact, one study found that, when aligned with a strategic plan, organizations with clearly defined vision and mission statements financially outperform those without them.

Yet many companies struggle to articulate their vision. In a survey of more than a million leaders, authors James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner found that one of the biggest challenges leaders face is “communicating an image of the future that draws others in—that speaks to what others see and feel.” They also identified that ability as the defining trait that distinguishes leaders from non-leaders.

From leadership to communication, organizations can develop bad habits just as easily as people. Awareness is the first step toward rooting them out for good.

SaneBox is an easy-to-use efficiency tool that helps you breeze through your email. Nothing to download, install or learn—it just works. See how »

A dysfunctional email culture can strangle productivity, keeping employees scrambling on the inbox hamster wheel. It can also undermine work-life balance, break down effective communication and suck the life out of your company.

“One of the things I’ve tried to do is uproot any sort of e-mail culture at Evernote. We strongly discourage lengthy e-mail threads with everyone weighing in,” he told the New York Times. “If you want to talk to somebody and you’re a couple floors apart, I kind of want you to get up and go talk to them.”

But launching an email revolution isn’t as simple as creating a few policies for managing email use. A company’s culture evolves from a delicate mix of each individual’s values, attitudes and behavior. Leaders who go in with a hammer where a scalpel is needed will end up smashing more than a few bad habits—just ask the healthcare provider Aetna, which blew through four CEOs in five years before it landed one who could flip the company’s intransigent culture.

Here are some tips to help you clean up email use within your company’s culture:

Tell a new story.

As a leader, “changing an entrenched culture is the toughest task you will face,” says the Wall Street Journal. “To do so, you must win the hearts and minds of the people you work with, and that takes both cunning and persuasion.”

In the book Blue Ocean Strategy, authors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne identify four primary hurdles to broad organizational change. The first is that workers must understand why the change is needed. The third is that they have to want it.

To win your employees’ hearts and minds, you need to change the conversations your company is having about email. Talk openly about the ways email is hurting the workplace, and help employees understand how shifting the culture will benefit them.

Pull the thread on your current culture.

If you don’t address the underlying reasons your toxic email culture developed, it will keep reasserting itself despite your best efforts. To unravel this tangled web, find a loose thread and give it a tug by repeatedly asking the world’s most powerful question: “Why?”

For example, if you’ve noticed that employees tend to copy too many people on emails, find out why. The answer might point to a core lack of trust within your company, causing employees to adopt defensive email habits. Once you know how the existing culture developed, you can work to eliminate the conditions that trigger the undesirable behavior.

Model the change you want to see.

It’s easy to project the email problem onto everyone else. It’s harder to take a good, hard look at how your own email habits feed the current culture.

For example, if a manager sends an urgent email requesting an immediate response, and an employee who’s working on a big project misses it, that employee might learn that he can never ignore incoming emails in favor of getting work done. Furthermore, the manager has just sent the message that it’s acceptable to use email as an urgent delivery system.

Similarly, managers who habitually send emails after hours might unintentionally give the impression that employees are expected to work around the clock.

There’s growing evidence that simply altering the email habits of your top leaders can lead to organization-wide shifts. When the London-based company International Power aimed to cut the number of emails its executives sent by 20 percent, the end result was an overall 64 percent decrease in email use throughout the organization, translating to a 7 percent boost in productivity.

Not long ago, multi-tasking was the superpower everyone clamored for. Employees who could conduct a meeting, finalize a report and give feedback on a proposal—all while managing email—rose to the top of the office food chain.

But it turns out our workplace hero is actually a villain. Multi-tasking doesn’t increase productivity after all, research shows. In fact, it leeches your brain power.

Interruptions deluge today’s workers, from the pinging of an email alert to the ringing of a phone. Just using a computer at work ensures a distraction every 10.5 minutes, on average. By the end of the day, all that multi-tasking can dock our productivity by as much as 40 percent, says the Harvard Business Review.

“Multi-tasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes,” said cognitive scientist David E. Meyer told the New York Times. “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.”

We pay a price for it, too. According to one business research analyst, interruptions cost the American economy an estimated $650 billion a year. Even worse: They lower your IQ.

How multi-tasking hurts your brain

When we think we’re multi-tasking, we’re actually task switching. That’s because only 2 percent of us are actually physically capable of effectively multi-tasking. The rest of us can handle only one cognitive function at a time. It’s a core limitation of the powerhouse we call a brain.

Task switching ties up several different parts of that powerhouse. One of those is the pre-frontal cortex, which allows to put ideas together and solve problems. When this area of the brain is preoccupied with task switching, our creativity takes a big hit.

Unfortunately, the more we switch between tasks, the more we slow our brain’s ability to function—a lot like running a bunch of programs on your computer at once. Even if the actual interruption lasts only 1/10 of a second (deleting emails, for example) we often don’t return to our original task right away. If we’re doing something that requires a lot of brain power, it can take as long as 15 minutes to switch back.

Lost time aside, attempting to multi-task comes with some lovely side effects. For starters, it can knock 10 points off your IQ—the equivalent of missing a whole night’s sleep. It also stresses us out, frustrates us and causes prospective memory failure, or the inability to remember tasks we need to do in the future.

Not exactly the stuff office superheroes are made of, is it?

Avoiding the task-switching trap

Sadly, avoiding interruptions in the digital age is nigh impossible. But you can minimize them.

Concentrated time: The opposite of multi-tasking, concentrated time means setting aside time for working on just one task. No answering or deleting emails. No surfing the web. Just you, your brain and the task at hand.

Batch processing: Cut down on the time you spend managing email by checking your inbox only at certain times of the day. For example, you might answer the priority emails in your inbox first thing in the morning, then scan the trivial emails in your SaneLater folder in the afternoon. The rest of the time, you have permission to ignore that pinging email alert.

80/20 rule: Twenty percent of the work you do drives 80 percent of your impact. Identify the 20 percent of your tasks that are responsible for your effectiveness, and do those—preferably one at a time.

It’s no secret that email can be a huge distraction. SaneBox keeps you focused by only showing you the emails that matter, when they matter.